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Thursday, December 6, 2012

NHL owners and players will get together again later today after a marathon day of negotiations Wednesday as they continue to try to make a push toward the resolution of the owners’ lockout.

A source said the discussions were touch and go for a while during the nearly nine hours of meetings – over two sessions. Although the sides made some progress, there were times when talks nearly broke down before they were able to get them back on track. They are still in at the critical stage, though, with significant work left to get a deal done.

The players plan to meet internally this morning before reconvening with the owners. The players-owners meeting is expected to begin around noon, but that start time will be impacted by the length of the players' internal meeting.

“We obviously had a number of meetings today over many hours,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said after the talks concluded around 12:50 a.m. Thursday. “We didn’t start the meeting until after our (board of governors) meeting, but obviously had a couple of sessions with the players’ association. We had good candid dialogue on a lot of issues. There continue to be some critical open issues between the two parties and we understand the union should be getting back to us tomorrow on some of those issues.”

NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr and special counsel Steve Fehr left without talking to the media, but Winnipeg Jets defenseman Ron Hainsey, who was in on the negotiations today, did make a brief statement.

“We had a series of candid discussions tonight and we plan on meeting again tomorrow,” Hainsey said.

After talking about concepts during Tuesday’s meetings, the players and owners got into specifics with proposals today and there was quite a bit of back and forth. The owners’ group went into the meeting with the players and left several times to hold internal meetings and prepare counterproposals.

They began the day with six owners and 19 players with Daly and Steve Fehr also in attendance. By the end of the night, the groups were whittled down to only two owners and a handful of players.

Among the topics covered were contract lengths and the length of the new collective bargaining agreement, which the league would like to be 10 years. (The league reportedly included an opt-out clause after eight years.)

The NHL reportedly increased its offer on make-whole payments, which would be used to cover deferred payments on existing contracts, to $300 million. The NHL had previously offered $211 million in make-whole payments while the NHLPA proposed $393 million over a five-year deal on Nov. 20.

TSN's Bob McKenzie reported that $50 million of the NHL's make-whole total would go toward pension funding and that would not come out of the players' share of hockey-related revenue.

The league also reportedly gave up its bid to change the rules on unrestricted free agency age (currently 27 or 7 years in the league) and arbitration eligibility.

The league is still looking for limits on contract lengths, though, and a 5 percent limit on the variance in salary from year to year. The NHL proposed limiting contract length to seven years for a re-signing its own player and five years for a team signing a player from another team.

About

TOM GULITTI has covered the New Jersey Devils for The Record since 2002. Prior to that, he covered the New York Rangers for four years. Gulitti joined The Record in 1998 after six years at The North Jersey Herald News. He graduated from Binghamton University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric-Literature.